Almost two years ago I asked and then self-answered this question about certificates. I did so because handling certificates has always been a great pain, requiring a combination of disparate command-line tools used in a specific order, without any end-to-end tutorials / how-to's available for common scenarios. And yes, it was an instant self-answer, because I first researched the problem, had no luck finding an answer, figured out my own steps, and then posted Q&A at once to SO.

Hence once I figured out myself how to solve a particular problem, I decided to document my effort here on SO for others to benefit. However, my Q&A pair—although I believe both the Q and the A satisfy SO quality standards—got downvoted many times. In particular:

my question clearly states the intent, the problem encountered, sources researched, and what I'm looking for;

everyone can validate the correctness of my answer my simply following the steps presented;

my Q&A pair follows up on a similar, yet very different in respect to the type of the certificate, Q&A pair I posted before.

In contrast to the downvoted Q&A pair, the previous one got may upvotes. Both deal with a similar problem in the same way and at the same level of quality. I don't really care of the downvotes themselves, but I view them as deliberately lowering the perceived quality of my answer, which is perfectly correct and may help others in a similar situation.

I read through relevant Meta SO questions on this topic (like this, this, this and this) but just didn't get a satisfactory answer.

My question is: How should I deal with this situation in order to provide the biggest benefit for the community? Some of the options that come up to my mind:

leave it as it is, downvotes or not;

delete the answer, and post it again to get rid of the downvotes in order not to discourage future readers;

delete both the question and answer and post them again—loosing permalinks, which is generally a bad thing.

Update: In respect to the discussion in comments let me clarify a couple things:

The first downvote I received was like minutes after posting the question and answer (it might be after accepting the answer—don't remember exactly).

I never received any comments regarding the quality, there were no close votes etc.

Yes, after collecting four downvotes (1.5 years after the date of the original post), I posted a comment (now deleted—likely flagged and/or deleted by a mod) which might have been a bit “harsh” but generally express my feeling like “What? Why do you guys silently downvote when someone is trying to share knowledge? I better stop trying next time…”

It may sound selfish by I do assume my answers on this site to be of generally acceptable level of qualify based on the overall number of downvotes I ever received.

The further downvotes received after the first pair of downvotes seemed more like “this was downvoted previously, no-brainer to downvote myself too” / “didn't solve my unique problem, downvote regardless of how useful it may be to others” type of actions.

So, seriously, is there a better way or better process to share someone's knowledge and/or making this my specific Q&A pair generally better? I do believe purposeless downvotes just distract future readers from reading a possible solution to their problem.

Update 2: Here we go :-)

Disclaimer: I'm not asking this in order to attract a handful of upvotes, but to treat this in a serious way. I was thinking of cleaning this up for quite a long time.

Just ensure you make a good question and give a good answer.
– πάντα ῥεῖJan 7 '16 at 11:42

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@πάνταῥεῖ I honestly believe I did exactly that, so that's why I'm asking this question here. Btw. I keep returning myself to these two Q&A pairs referred in this question every year in order to follow those steps…
– Ondrej TucnyJan 7 '16 at 11:46

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I have to say, protecting the Q+A when there in fact were no other answers posted and posting a threat in a comment is not a good way to inspire other SO users to care about your Q+A. Good Q+A has more than one answer and invites comments when something is a-miss, you are actively blocking that. Consider a blog post instead.
– Hans PassantJan 7 '16 at 12:14

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@HansPassant Thanks for this comment; actually I wasn't fully aware of when question protection should be used, and I thought it of a mechanism for limiting “vandalism”. This was in reaction to my experience with deliberate downvotes on other highly upvoted questions done without a particular reason.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 7 '16 at 12:18

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I've tried Q&A around three times now and they have been received pretty good so far. First and foremost is what πάνταῥεῖ mentioned: solid answer and solid question. Other than those two I always prefer to not accept my answer immediately; it reaks arrogance when you do that and doesn't really give incentive to others to answer, I give it 2 days at least. The other option you could consider is leaving a comment on the question indicating that this is a Q&A, an acceptable practice, and urge others to contribute if they see fit. Of course many people are just jealous of Q+A rep, ignore them.
– Jim Fasarakis HilliardJan 7 '16 at 12:58

@Jim Looks like a good recommendation, thanks. Also, I was thinking of posting such Q&A as a community wiki; actually didn't think of it before.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 7 '16 at 13:01

@OndrejTucny I believe you asked a legit question and gave a legit answer. I assume some people must have bad days and downvote without really understanding the knowledge you shared. My opinion. ^^
– kemicofaJan 7 '16 at 13:19

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@KФ Or they just felt that the posts weren't quality posts, and didn't feel like commenting to explain why given the OP's clearly confrontational attitude as expressed in his comments. Don't assume malice in comments by default; assume the voter truely feels the content isn't useful unless you see clear evidence to the contrary. And even if you think the post is useful, recognize that people can disagree over the quality of a post, so just because you like a post doesn't mean anyone who downvotes it is doing so despite the fact that they think the post is useful.
– ServyJan 7 '16 at 15:47

@ThisSuitIsBlackNot I was actually not aware of this. It scares me now how my decision coincided with this rule.
– Jim Fasarakis HilliardJan 7 '16 at 17:19

2

(Not at all my area of interest, just feeling I get from reading both posts) Could your second post not have been an edit to your first, to account for the new use case? It reads as "follow these steps, but slightly differently". Is there any reason to still follow the steps in your first post, knowing the problems it causes? That both the question and answer in your second post link to your previous one also comes across as shamelessly self-promotional?
– TZHXJan 8 '16 at 19:55

@TZHX Interesting points. In both cases you want a similar results—a PFX certificate. However, the properties of a code signing and a WCT Net.TCP SSL certificates are different. People look either for one or the another, not both. Hence two different Q&A pairs, their are not duplicates IMO. I didn't thought of pointing to a source as a self-promo. Why do you get such feeling? I'm really interested to know.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 20:08

1

Forgive me if I missed something, but wouldn't your example Q&A combo be 'off topic' for SO (as it, especially the answer, doesn't seem to 'directly involve programming or programming tools') and instead be a perfect fit for Server Fault? If so, then, perhaps that might be the simple reason for the downvotes? I'm just trying to think of a more reasonable explanation (compared to decent Q&A's being downvoted just because their self-answered)..
– GitaarLABJan 9 '16 at 7:00

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@GitaarLAB It's tightly related to WCF endpoint security configuration, so I assume it's on-topic, even thought it might be understood as a border case. However, should it be considered off-topic, I think it would have been closed as such a long time ago.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 9 '16 at 11:18

4 Answers
4

Posting self-answered questions, while permitted and even encouraged, can be risky, because it can easily come across as self-promotion or soapboxing, or as fishing for rep by posting useless trivia.

In general, the safest way to contribute to SO (in terms of avoiding criticism and downvotes) is by answering questions. That's because, when you answer a question that someone else posted, you're implicitly contributing information that someone else is interested in. Thus, unless your answer is clearly incorrect, harmful or redundant, it's unlikely to get downvoted.

Asking questions is somewhat more risky; to earn upvotes on your question, you have to convince others that it's 1) on topic, 2) not already trivially answered elsewhere, and 3) at least potentially of interest to more people than just yourself. If the reason for your question seems to be just that you didn't read the manual, that you've made some silly mistake, or that you're trying to do some weird and ass-backwards thing that no reasonable person would do, you're unlikely to get many upvotes, and may even have your question downvoted.

Even so, asking a normal question does at least carry the implicit presumption that your question makes sense, and that (you believe that) you have a genuine need for an answer. If someone does provide an answer, that further validates those presumptions, at least to some degree.

Asking and self-answering, however, not only carries all the risks of asking questions in the first place, but it also may easily seem as if you're just posting for the sake of enjoying seeing your own words on the page (or to promote your own views or projects, or to try to make you look smart by answering problems that are entirely of your own devising). Basically, people tend to view self-answered questions more suspiciously because self-answering bypasses one of the basic built-in safeguards of the SE Q&A model: requiring at least two people to be interested in a question for it to be answered.

So, how do you safely post a self-answered question, then? Well, sometimes there may be no problem at all; if the question is clearly interesting, and the answer clearly valid and well written, then you're unlikely to get any downvotes.

In some cases, you may want to include a brief note in your question or answer explaining what you're doing, and why. For example, if you're trying to provide a "canonical" Q&A on a subject that has been touched on by many previous questions, you may wish to note this for the benefit of readers who haven't seen those previous questions.

You may also want to avoid giving the impression that you're trying to unfairly pre-empt your question being (better) answered by others. In some cases, just a brief note saying "I've provided my own answer below, but I'd be glad to receive any better solutions" may suffice for this. For "canonical" questions, especially where the idea is to collect scattered information into a single, definitive answer, making your answer a Community Wiki so that others can freely improve it (and noting so in the text) may be useful. In some cases, you may even wish to delay posting your own answer, and wait to see if someone else will answer your question first.

As for your example question and answer, to me the biggest issue with it (besides the fact that it's about a somewhat obscure subject, and that its topicality on SO might be considered marginal) is that it basically seems to be just a correction to a shortcoming in your previous Q&A. Thus, I don't see a good reason why you needed to post a separate question and answer about it, when you could've just edited your previous answer to describe the improved solution and its advantages.

Granted, since I'm hardly an expert on the OpenSSL toolchain (although I do know something about it), my impression could be mistaken. But the situation sure looks like this:

Q1: How do I do X?

A1: Figured it out, I need to do foo.

...later...

Q2: Now I need to do this other similar thing Y, but foo doesn't work. What can I do instead?

A2: Oh, it turns out foo only works for X, not Y. Doing bar will solve both problems.

when you could've just skipped Q2 and A2, and simply edited A1 into:

A1 (edited): Do bar; besides X, it will also solve the related issue Y.

and possibly also edited Q1 into:

Q1 (edited): How can I do the generic thing Z (e.g. X or Y)?

It seems quite plausible that others may have also picked up on this redundancy, which is why your later Q&A pair didn't get such a positive reception as the earlier one.

(Or, of course, it might just be down to bad luck, or the fact that SO culture has become a lot more critical of new questions as the site has grown over the three years between your questions. But the apparent redundancy surely didn't help.)

The problem you point out with the example Q&A is also one I saw. (I've been delaying posting an answer due to being busy with other things, and now that you've posted your answer I don't have to!) If it were me, I would have edited the answer on the original Q&A pair (and perhaps the question too, if necessary to make the new answer sensible) to fix the information loss problem there rather than post a new Q&A pair. You and I are probably not the only ones who saw this.
– LouisJan 8 '16 at 20:11

First of all, thanks for the first answer that somehow analyses the problem. I really appreciate it. I do agree a SSL-secured WCF Net.TCP is an obscure topic :-) On the other hand, I think working with a code signing certificate is like 100x more frequent than working with a WCP Net.TCP SSL cert. The cert preparation processes are just different. The CA-issued source files are even in different formats, holding different sets of info. This is why I believe it's better to keep them in separate questions.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 20:21

Based on your and @Raedwald's answer I think a better explanation that this is supposed to be a canonical answer, posted as a community wiki, would be a right approach.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 20:22

1

You may also want to avoid giving the impression that you're trying to unfairly pre-empt your question being (better) answered by others. In some cases, just a brief note saying "I've provided my own answer below, but I'd be glad to receive any better solutions" may suffice for this. That point immediately stuck me as important as soon as I read it.
– Steven M. VascellaroAug 3 '17 at 16:57

You should not be deleting and reposting content just to remove downvotes. That's completely abusive behavior of the site.

If you can find any problems with the post that could have resulted in downvotes, address them. If you honestly can't see any way of improving the post, consider consulting a few others for feedback on the quality of the posts to look for ways of improving it; it's easy to overlook the problems in your own writing.

Posting extremely comments on the posts to complain about downvotes is probably the worst possible thing you can do. It virtually ensures that none of the downvoters, nor anyone else that comes along and feels that the post is not a quality post, will ever comment to explain what problem(s) they have with the content, as you've made it clear to them that you're not capable of accepting that criticism constructively and actually fixing those problems, so the best thing you could do at this point is delete that comment on your answer.

answered Jan 16 '14 at 18:43 and he commented on Jun 11 '15 at 16:17. He waited quite a bit before leaving a comment. The downvoters had ample (assuming that the three downvoters didn't all downvote the day he left the comment) time to leave a comment as to why they didn't find his question and answer useful. Sure he should have left a different kind of comment (a more polite one), but I can understand his frustration. Why share knowledge that you had to struggle through to find, when people just downvote it and leave no comment what so ever?
– kemicofaJan 7 '16 at 16:01

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@KФ The fact that it's posted a year and a half later means that there's virtually zero chance of the people that downvoted ever seeing the comment. And as I said, it's basically only ever telling anyone who finds the post later that the author isn't willing to accept constructive criticism, so they shouldn't bother commenting if they see a problem with the post. It doesn't matter how long you wait to post such a comment, it's virtually universally harmful to do so, at any time. (or, at best, not helpful)
– ServyJan 7 '16 at 16:13

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Agreed that his comment is harmful and should be eventually removed. I believe however that suppose he has overlooked something and improved it, what then? I rarely see edited questions get upvoted if it's not a frequently visited question/answer.
– kemicofaJan 7 '16 at 16:26

@KФ If it was truly fixed then presumably the people that come upon the question later on would be more inclined to upvote it than to downvote it. It seems that the views on the post are quite low inherently due to the nature of the actual content; there's no real way around that.
– ServyJan 7 '16 at 16:47

@KФ Exactly. I didn't post a comment until gathering four downvotes (combined). I posted it shortly after receiving the last downvote, because from my perspective downvoting this answer is just ridiculous. Everyone who reads the answer a follows the steps outlines gets an exact result, which is a solution to a clearly stated problem.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 12:10

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@Servy I'm happy to improve my own answers and I do it frequently when I receive constructive feedback. I don't think downvotes that have no visible grounds are constructive, especially when the first downvote was received like minutes after posting the question. There have been a handful of very smart and high-rep SO users reading through my Q&A pair based on this meta post, but noone posted any tip on where and why it needed an improvement.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 12:13

@Servy I do agree deleting the question and posting again would be an abuse of the site. A reason why I asked here.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 12:13

2

@OndrejTucny Posting a comment asserting that you know your answer is perfect and couldn't have any flaws does not give the impression that you're willing to accept constructive criticism. It does the opposite. The fact that you think downvoting it is "ridiculous" only confirms that. It is not unconstructive to downvote a post that one thinks is bad, even without posting a comment.
– ServyJan 8 '16 at 13:51

@Servy Well there was noexpressed criticism. None. Zero. Look at both answeres linked in my post—one of them is +18, another one -3. Both deal with a similar problem, outline steps in the same way, provide a complete description of a solution to a well described initial situation. Same with the questions—one is +8, another one -1.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 16:12

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@OndrejTucny So? People aren't obligated to explain to you why they don't think your post is useful.
– ServyJan 8 '16 at 16:21

@Servy Sorry, but discussing one comment, which didn't cause the original situation, is irrelevant now. I'd like to get a sensible answer to my question.
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 16:29

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@OndrejTucny And I gave you an answer to your question in my answer.
– ServyJan 8 '16 at 16:30

Some people seem to think that answering your own question is wrong; I've received down votes I honestly can not explain any other way. They do not understand that doing so is actually encouraged. They do not understand that the site exists not to get answers to questions, but to build a repository of good questions with good answers.

Therefore when I now post an answer to one of my own questions I post a comment pointing out that self answers are encouraged, with a link to the FAQ.

Looks like a good idea. Do you have a standardized disclaimer you could share?
– Ondrej TucnyJan 8 '16 at 18:16

4

Well, that might actually work reasonably well. Though getting it right to neither sound petulant, defensive, aggressive, accusing or the like is probably ticklish. Especially as one must avoid the impression of asserting that the self-answer would excuse any flaw in the question.
– DeduplicatorJan 8 '16 at 19:43

When you answer your own question too soon, it may attract down votes. So when you self answering make sure:

1) Question is not duplicate.
2) You are not self promoting your blogs or products.
3) The question-answer pair is useful to others and you are not doing it just for earning reputation.
4) If you have found that solution your own, mention that in the answer.